Facial recognition systems are increasingly used in a variety of applications. For example, facial recognition may be employed as part of a security check to either permit or deny access by a person to some resource, data or physical entry to a secured location. As another example, facial recognition is often used to identify people in photographs as an aid to organizing collections of photos or quickly identifying photos of interest.
Existing techniques for facial recognition generally provide satisfactory results under controlled conditions. In a real world environment, however, facial appearance can vary dramatically due to changes in expression, illumination conditions, orientation/pose, etc. Such variations can significantly degrade recognition performance. Some approaches to address this problem require an on-line learning phase, while other approaches require the generation of thousands of classifiers to recognize a single face. These techniques impose relatively large computational burdens which may not be suitable for real-time applications.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications, and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.